In two weeks I will be attending my 25th college reunion at Princeton University. As you can imagine would be the case at one of this country’s oldest institutions of higher learning, Princeton prides itself on its traditions, and “Reunions” as the alumni body call it, is one of our most cherished.
The plural is purposeful as well because all major and minor reunion classes gather on campus to meet and consume alcohol in quantities, or so the legend goes, second only to the Indy 500 for a singular event in the United States. Reunions is serious business and there are alumni who return every year, which allows for the highlight event of the weekend, P-rade, to take on fascinating detail.
Picture a boulevard lined with everyone who ever went to your university neatly arranged by graduating class order. Now imagine each class marching down that boulevard, in clever costumes and great fanfare, with the oldest classes taking their turn first and the current graduating class joining in at the tail end. That is P-rade. I’ve seen it many times, as both a major-reunion alumnus and as an employee of the university for 10 years, and it has never ceased to inspire me.
You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with being transgender? Not much. Unless you count how the 15 pounds I’ve gained since senior year, will run a far second in conversation with classmates to the fact that a couple of those pounds went to breasts I didn’t have the last time they saw me 25 years ago. However, I’ve always loved P-rade for the simple fact that it is a glimpse into the cultural history of my alma mater and country. What begins with white men and their wives gives way to female graduates, a colorful explosion of skin tones and the wonderful diaspora of modern American life. Times change and I often wonder how the historical “Princeton Man” reacted when that term had to be broadened to encompass today’s diverse alumni body. I know there must have been resistance similar to what we are seeing today in the LGBTQ+ community.
Being transgender means subverting traditional definitions. This goes beyond the obvious definitions of “man” and “woman.” It extends into much of the LGBQ+ attraction spectrum itself. In my early days in Orlando, I had a gay therapist who confided in me that, before he started working with trans women, he believed that we were gay men who chose to take on the appearance of women to escape society’s disapproval of homosexual relations. It never occurred to him that transgender people might be gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer or any of the other colors of our rainbow. The mistake he made, and the mistake many people inside our own community continue to make, is to see transgender people through the filter of their own orientation instead of our gender identity.
Perhaps my therapist’s point of view was skewed because the persecution many in the LGBQ+ face is often motivated by intimacy. Loving someone of the same sex isn’t as much a problem as physical expressions of that love in public, such as holding hands or kissing. The successful bulwark that has been carefully constructed by the gay community over the years to bring us to this moment in time of greater acceptance in the U.S. is that “love is love.” However, the will to encompass transgender people into that love has been decidedly weaker because it can challenge traditional societal notions of sexual orientation.
Perhaps my evidence is anecdotal, but my social media feeds have been full of gay cisgender people defending their rejection of relationships with gay transgender people by citing their sexual orientation and corresponding genital preference. Sexual orientation is thus defined solely around what we have between our legs with no consideration given at all to gender identity. For example, a lesbian trans woman who has not had bottom surgery would not be an acceptable romantic interest for a cisgender lesbian. These discussions on social media have often devolved into strident accusations of transphobia by transgender people only to be met with accusations of homophobia from the cisgender gay half.
I think it is understandable that pre-bottom surgery transgender people would present a challenge to one’s identity as a gay person in these cases, as it requires some flexibility to look past sex in favor of gender identity. I also don’t think anybody should be pressured to do anything they don’t want to do. However, I also think that the dividing line between legitimate preference and transphobia all comes down to fear. Transphobia isn’t fear of transgender people. It’s fear of how our identities are challenged by transgender people. Fear of how we might appear to our fellow gay or lesbian friends. Fear of having to defend ourselves and our transgender loved one to family who barely accept our gayness. Fear of judgment by strangers who might wonder, if we are willing to stretch our personal definition of gay to encompass pre-op trans people, why can’t we stretch it to the opposite sex? And maybe even a little fear that we aren’t as open and accepting as we like to believe.
As I watch P-rade go by this year, I know I’ll be struck by how much grander it gets by the end. The “Princeton Man” didn’t disappear, as I am sure he feared would happen when the university opened up its admissions to everyone. He just became part of a larger whole that was strengthened by the expansion of the definition of Princeton alumni. It didn’t end up being a zero-sum game. I have faith that we in the LGBTQ+ community will one day learn the same lesson.
Maia Monet is the Multimedia Assistant for Watermark and owns a YouTube channel on lesbian and transgender topics. You can view her videos at youtube.com/melodymaia.
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